The Five Types of Network Connections You Need at Work
The phrase, “It’s not what you know but who you know” has never been more true in this era of flattened org structures, lean (or downright emaciated) HR processes, overloaded recruiters, and AI-powered job scammers. Computers are writing and reviewing resumes, tracking your work contributions, and penning your performance evaluations. This doesn’t mean surrender to your AI overlords – whatever your professional goal, you need to double down on investing in your human connections to stand out among the rising tide of slop.
“You need to double down on investing in your human connections to stand out among the rising tide of slop.”
I’ve spoken to many groups of people about self advocacy over the years, and my content on networking always seems to garner a big response. I suspect it’s because we all know we need to build strong networks, but rarely are we given anything concrete about what a strong network looks like and how to build one for ourselves. I’m going to share what the research tells us about what our networks should look like for better career outcomes, and in a follow up article, I’ll provide some tips on how to go about building your network.
Note: This article references loads of research related to gender (and what little I could find related to race and ethnicity). This research benefits men and women alike. Without critical analysis of these differences, we wouldn’t come to understand why certain network shapes are so beneficial. If you want to be more intentional about building your network, then regardless of your identity this article is for you.
Your ideal network
Your “ideal” network might look different depending on your goals, i.e. if you’re building a network to land a new job, switch to an entirely different role/function, or get promoted. But the beauty of a network is that it can continuously grow and morph based on your current needs; which relationships you choose to foster will depend on the season you’re in. This content will probably feel most apt to people who are currently employed and seeking internal growth opportunities, but regardless of your goals, the building blocks of a good professional network are largely the same.
A good professional network consists of:
Mentors
Sponsors
Protégés
Hub connections
Your “squad”
I’ll give you some definitions for each of these, along with some research to back up the claim that this investment is worth your effort. As you read on, make note that these groups overlap, so many of your connections may not fall neatly into one category but might instead span a few of them – or even all five!
Mentors
A mentor is someone with relevant experience and knowledge who can advise you on work- or career-related topics. You’re probably already familiar with the concept of mentorship and have a few mentors you can call when you need advice or guidance.
People who might make good mentors:
Your current manager or a former boss that you still keep in touch with
A more experienced and/or more tenured person in your same role
A more experienced person in an adjacent role
Someone occupying a role you want in the future
Someone you look up to because they are good at things you’d like to be good at
Pro-tip: Someone once told me, if you want to be good at x, don’t look for mentorship from someone who is naturally good at x, look for someone who became good at x. People who are naturally good at something often have a hard time teaching it to others. Although it can be a bit tricky to suss out in practice, this is a valuable mode of thinking!
Like all networking relationships, the strongest relationships are ones that are built over time, often organically. You might be assigned a mentor at your job – like a “new hire buddy” or someone matched to you via a formal mentorship program. These types of mentors can be useful and if you’re lucky, can lead to long lasting relationships. However, my hot take on these programs is that their primary purpose often has little to do with helping you accomplish your career goals. What’s more, the odds of you forming a deep and mutually beneficial relationship with a mentor who's been assigned to you randomly or based off of a short questionnaire are no better than the odds of making a romantic connection with a blind date. We are better off choosing mentors for ourselves based on our needs, personal interests, and overall vibes, and letting those relationships deepen over time.
Even still, having deep relationships with mentors doesn’t necessarily translate to meaningful career progress. While this statement is true regardless of one’s gender, it’s made apparent by research into men and women’s promotion rates. Women are more likely to be mentored than men, yet they are promoted less often. Additionally, women who are mentored by men are paid more and experience more promotions. As Brad Johnson, a psychology professor at the US Naval Academy, concludes, “Is this because guys are better mentors? No. [It’s] because they have different kinds of positions and more power.”
“Mentors with power and influence have the potential to become sponsors, and those are the arguably the most powerful connections to have.”
This means you should be strategic about who you pursue as a mentor. First note that there’s no limit to the number of mentors you can have. You should have many people you can call on for a variety of purposes, and you shouldn’t discriminate based on seniority (in fact, one of my mentors is almost a decade younger than I am and often calls me for professional advice, but she’s also one of the first people I call when I’m overthinking a risky life decision – fearlessness is her gift). But regardless of how large and varied your network is, it must include mentors with the power and influence to pull you up with them. Mentors with power and influence have the potential to become sponsors, and those are the arguably the most powerful connections to have.
Sponsors
A sponsor is someone with power and influence who is willing to use their political capital to advocate for you. Sponsors might start out as mentors initially; they might meet with you regularly to share knowledge and give advice. Then as they get to know your talents and work product, they start to take an active role in advocating for your growth. Herminia Ibarra, Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School (and in my opinion the preeminent voice on this topic), talks about sponsorship as a spectrum, wherein one starts out providing advice in a private setting and eventually progresses to public advocacy.
Common sponsor activities include:
Nominating you for projects or roles that are high visibility and/or align with your interests.
Proactively sharing your goals with others (e.g. “Jill is on the lookout for a management role right now. Keep her in mind if you hear of anything opening up.”)
Endorsing you in public settings and in rooms you’re not in.
Carving out work for you that will allow you to showcase your talents or demonstrate progress in addressing prior constructive feedback.
Providing air cover so you can take on risky challenges without the fear of failure.
Offering you their spot on a panel, in a meeting, or as a presenter.
Advocating for your promotion to decision makers.
Sponsorship is a key differentiator in what helps people advance at work – it is critically important for promotions into senior leadership positions. Consider these stats:
Men with sponsors are promoted at 2x the rate of men without sponsors (Source: McKinsey)
Women with sponsors are promoted at 1.7x the rate of women without sponsors (Source: McKinsey)
Black managers are 65% more likely to be promoted if they have a sponsor (Source: HBR and Coqual)
Black employees who are sponsored are 60% less likely to quit within a year vs those without sponsors (Source: HBR and Coqual)
55% of Asian employees with a sponsor are happy with their rate of advancement, compared to 30% without a sponsor. (Source: Coqual)
61% of Hispanic employees with a sponsor are happy with their rate of advancement, compared to 43% without a sponsor. (Source: Coqual)
There are a lot of things we could unpack in these numbers, but the pertinent takeaway is that if you want a promotion, find a sponsor.
Who makes a good sponsor? The most obvious answer is your boss, and hopefully for most of you that’s true in practice. Your boss has access to rooms that you don’t, they often know about opportunities before you do, they have control over how work gets assigned, they know how your company’s People processes work, and they are highly influential in promotion decisions. If your boss is willing to advocate for you, you’re already in a good position.
However, I encourage people not to stop at one sponsor. What if your manager decides to leave the company or switch orgs? What if they have a mediocre reputation, or they aren’t very convincing in promotion discussions (which you might never know)? What if your new boss is hired right before the performance cycle, and they want you to wait until they figure out the process? For these scenarios, you need what I call “sponsor insurance” – additional people of influence who will advocate for you. Consider skip level managers (i.e. someone in your management chain other than your boss), senior stakeholders, and especially more senior peers. As an example, having a “senior staff” level employee say “the work Jill does is consistently excellent and of staff level complexity” in a promotion debate is gold. It can often be more valuable than a manager’s opinion, if your management and IC tracks are separated.
“In order to be sponsored, you must do great work that others can showcase; you must prove yourself capable of the growth opportunities you’re seeking.”
What has so far gone unsaid is that sponsorship is not something you’re granted by default. Your boss should be your sponsor – as long as you’re doing the work. When you ask for sponsorship, you’re asking for someone to stake their reputation on your ability to perform and deliver. In order to be sponsored, you must do great work that others can showcase; you must prove yourself capable of the growth opportunities you’re seeking. This is obvious if you put yourself in their shoes – which you should do, because having protégés is another important component of your network!
Protégés
A protégé is the person on the other side of the mentoring or sponsoring relationship, defined as someone who is guided by a more experienced and influential person. Regardless of our seniority, most of us likely already mentor and/or sponsor more junior talent for altruistic reasons. It makes us feel good to help, and we want to see people build successful careers. We also might recognize that investing in the up-and-coming talent behind us propels us forward. When we invest in our protégés, we can delegate more work to them, which then frees us up to take on larger challenges and greater scope. We become known for building strong teams, attracting high potential talent, and creating multiplicative impact.
Again, don’t take my word for it: According to Harvard Business Review, “managers and executives who proactively sponsor high-achieving junior talent are 53% more likely to advance to the next rung of the leadership ladder than peers who fail to sponsor.”
There is however an important caveat: when sponsorship happens naturally, what emerges is a trend of people sponsoring people who remind them of themselves. When we find commonality with others (maybe the school we attended or the state we grew up in or the cultural background we share), we are drawn to help. This is not malicious but human. But it has the unintended consequence of perpetuating any inequalities that already exist in our leadership ranks.
And we might not just be perpetuating these inequalities but exacerbating them as well. Coqual’s “Vaulting the Color Bar” study explores the concept of “affinity sponsorship,” defined as multicultural employees who sponsor protégés of the same background. What they found is hesitation among employees of color to engage in affinity sponsorships (both as a sponsor and a protégé) due to a perception of favoritism. On the one hand, this hesitation is unfortunate given that the data suggests protégés of color greatly benefit from having multicultural sponsors. On the other hand, there’s evidence that men benefit from hiring and promoting women, while women are penalized for doing the same. It stands to reason that this penalty applies to all affinity sponsorships.
“Just as we need a portfolio of sponsors for insurance, we must also build ‘a portfolio of wide-ranging talent’ when it comes to our protégés.”
What does this mean? What the Vaulting study concludes is that, just as we need a portfolio of sponsors for insurance, we must also build “a portfolio of wide-ranging talent” when it comes to our protégés. Not only should we continue to sponsor the people we’re drawn to, but we should also intentionally sponsor people who are different from us. Speaking from personal experience, any claims that I only sponsor women or people of color have been swiftly refuted by the wonderfully talented white male protégés I’m proud to have hired and promoted. (This is not hyperbole: I have had men refute these claims in the backchannels where these discussions take place). Use the power you have to sponsor a diverse portfolio of protégés – it is a strategic and mutually beneficial action that can tear down systems of inequity while also widening the reach of your own network.
Hub Connections
Truly, widening your network’s reach should be a primary goal, but it’s important to clarify that I’m not talking about network size. I used to believe that one of the main differentiators of men’s and women’s networks is that men’s networks are larger and more shallow while women’s networks are smaller and deeper (meaning that men have more surface-level relationships that are professionally transactional, while women form more intimate bonds with a smaller and less powerful community). While there’s research to partially back up this claim (and it’s true that women need to be less hesitant to use their networks for transactional gains), it’s not that simple. According to Brian Uzzi in his article for the Harvard Business Review, both women and men need to have a high degree of “centrality” in their networks, meaning that they are central in a network connected to many different hubs. Hub connections represent “nodes” in a network that provide connection and access to different groups of people. Therefore, it’s not actually the size of the network that matters but the overall reach. Consider this contrived example: A 20-person network consisting entirely of employees in the sales organization including department heads, vs. a 5-person network consisting of an Enterprise Sales Account Executive, a Commercial Business Development Manager, the COO, a Product Marketing Manager, and a Director of Engineering. Which network sounds more valuable to you in the long run?
“It’s not actually the size of the network that matters but the overall reach.”
When auditing your network, not only should you be evaluating it for power and influence, but also for the hubs your connections give you access to. Uzzi stresses that we must embrace randomness – to the point that we try random selection if we find ourselves struggling to break out of a homogenous and low-centrality network. It could be as simple as sitting down at the office lunch table with someone you’ve never met before, or asking someone you know with a high-centrality network for an intro to one of their hub connections. The more diverse your network (for all definitions of “diverse”), the more valuable.
Your “squad”
If you’ve built a network that contains a mix of mentors, mentors-turned-sponsors, a diverse portfolio of protégés, and a few hub connections, you truly have an embarrassment of professional riches. However this last category is the remaining piece of the puzzle that is critically important for women specifically. And because the research only looked into gender differences, I’m forced to draw my own conclusion that this category is also critically important for anyone who experiences a lack of representation in their role or industry.
Referring back to Uzzi’s research on network centrality, a key observation is that when men’s and women’s networks have the same shape (specifically having high degrees of centrality), then in order for women to achieve the same type of professional success, they also need an inner circle – or as I refer to it, a “squad.” Your squad is a group of 1-3 people similar in background or identity to you who can tell you like it is. The unproven hypothesis of this observation is that women benefit from having a close, inner circle of women who can provide private information about compensation, interviewing and negotiation strategies, organizational attitudes towards women, and strategies for internal advancement. It was notably impactful for a woman’s inner circle to comprise other women (and of course, the less overlap in their “hubs” the better), while the gender makeup of a man’s inner circle had no impact on his professional outcomes. It is for this reason that I surmise everyone should have a squad. For a lot of men, it may not help that much, but it also won’t hurt. For everyone else, it might make a remarkable difference in your pay and leadership authority.
“Everyone should have a squad.”
Your Network Portfolio
You may have spotted a common thread throughout these categories. It turns out that the “portfolio” approach is key. You need mentors with a wide range of backgrounds, skills, and influence. You need a strong sponsor and additional sponsor insurance. You need a wide range of protégés who make you look good. You need people who can connect you to hubs near and far, and an inner circle that spans multiple hubs. If you can find ways to continuously build and invest in those relationships, opportunities you never knew existed will find you. And maybe you’ll recognize what category you fall into for others. Perhaps it’ll make you think about how you show up for others as both mentor and sponsor.
And if you’re someone for whom networking feels unnatural, stay tuned for part two where I’ll share some actionable tips for how to build and nurture these relationships over time!